README.md

Pybatfish

What is Batfish?

Batfish is a network validation tool that provides correctness guarantees for security, reliability, and compliance by analyzing the configuration of network devices. It builds complete models of network behavior from device configurations and finds violations of network policies (built-in, user-defined, and best-practices).

A primary use case for Batfish is to validate configuration changes before deployment (though it can be used to validate deployed configurations as well). Pre-deployment validation is a critical gap in existing network automation workflows. By Batfish in automation workflows, network engineers can close this gap and ensure that only correct changes are deployed.

Batfish does NOT require direct access to network devices. The core analysis requires only the configuration of network devices. This analysis may be enhanced using additional information from the network such as:

How do I get started?

Install Pybatfish

We highly recommend that you install Pybatfish in a Python 3 virtual environment. Details on how to set one up can be found here. Once your virtual environment is setup and activated, upgrade pip and then install pybatfish.

Now, you are ready to evaluate your own network with Batfish. We encourage you to use Jupyter notebooks as your starting point, but you can use other methods that you are a comfortable with, e.g., an IDE like PyCharm or an interactive Python shell. If you choose to use Jupyter notebooks as your starting point, you need to install Jupyter in your virtual environment. Jupyter documentation can be found here - but the commands below will get you going.

python3 -m pip install jupyter
jupyter notebook

Our notebooks provide a quick start guide for different use cases. Beyond that, the complete documentation is available on readthedocs.